I just spent the last two hours chewing the fat with Mark Klein at MIT and Mark Tovey at Carleton, talking about all sorts of ideas, but loosely focussed on how distributed collaborative modeling efforts can help address global change issues (e.g. climate, peak oil, sustainability).

MK has a project, Climate Interactive,[update: Mark tells me I got the wrong project – it should be The Climate Collaboratorium. Climate Interactive is from a different group at MIT] which is exploring how climate simulation tools can be hooked up to discussions around decision making, which is one of the ideas we kicked around in our brainstorming sessions here.

MT has been exploring how you take ideas from distributed cognition and scale them up to much larger teams of people. He has put together a wonderful one-pager that summarized many interesting ideas on how mass collaboration can be applied in this space.

This conversation is going to keep me going for days on stuff to explore and blog about:

interesting conferences: WikiSym (the symposium on Wikis and open collaboration); DIAC-08 (online deliberation)